accented characters on us keyboard

[Anand Buddhdev]

I'm using a Trust keyboard (101 keys), US layout, but with the Euro 
symbol printed on the digit 5. When installing, I chose "us keyboard". 
Under this setup, the Euro symbol is not available. I searched archives 
and read up several websites, and finally understood how to use xmodmap 
to get the Euro symbol when pressing the windows key and 5 together. I 
also discovered that vim has an excellent compose feature, although by 
default is doesn't know about the Euro. I managed to add the Euro symbol 
using the "digraphs" command.

I also need to occasionally use accented characters. This is where it 
gets complicated for me. I searched some more, and found I can change to 
a "us international" keybaord, on which there are "dead keys", which I 
can use to get accented characters. But that is quite annoying, as the 
dead keys are the quotes, backtick and tilde, and on linux, I often use 
those keys. I have to press a space after the key to get the quote or 
tilde. And if I forget, I end up with an accented character :(

What I would ideally like is to have normal use of all they keys, but to 
be able to have a special key (compose key) that I can use to generate 
accented characters. I could use the windows key, right ALT key, or menu 
key for that. But even after searching various sites, I haven't been 
able to understand how I can achieve this. To be honest, there's a *lot* 
of information out there on international keyboards under linux. Some 
articles go into such great detail, leaving me confused. Others are too 
brief, or distro-specific. I haven't been able to find a decent article 
of a page that says "put this and that value in /etx/X11/XF86Config to 
get the windows key to act as compose.

Would a kind soul please help me achieve what I want?